Caoimhe’s reviews

City of Illusions ★★★☆☆

2026-06-17T12:12:48+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.

There are one or two places earlier in the novel where Falk has an internal dialogue with himself, perhaps hinting at the protagonist’s eventual plural nature. One might expect that to be developed more thoroughly throughout the book, and such dialogue to be explored in more detail after Falk-Ramarren dual awakening, but in Le Guin’s typical fashion much of the book is a slow journey exploring a character, the world, and their place in it, with a rush of action held off to the every end. Falk-Ramarren does not get much actual interplay in the text before it’s all over and we must imagine what their reconciliation of identity looks like ourselves.

It is also perhaps odd that the liars are defeated not just by truth but also in part by the secrecy, hierarchy and compartmentalisation of Werelian culture, though much like the origin of the Werelian culture itself that can only become useful through it’s joining together of human culture and understanding in Falk, who Ramarren would be lost without just as Falk would be lost without Ramarren.

Planet of Exile ★★★☆☆

2026-06-17T12:12:23+01:00

But who remembers the Year before last?

One people who live only in the concern of the immediate, who cannot look beyond one lifetime except as part of cycle without beginning or end, and another who only look to the past, only able to look to the future by looking at how they could survive together rather than apart.

Hadestown ★★★☆☆

2026-06-16T11:30:00+01:00

Making Hades—the god of the underworld, the dead, and wealth—a fossil fuel barron is a cute choice, and Alastair Parker’s booming Yorkshire accent works shockingly well for it. The characterisation of the characters is fun all around, with Orpheus as a complete dork and Persephone as the depressed live-of-the-party alcoholic and sometimes utter freak contortionist for some reason. Judging from the posters outside we had a understudy for Persephone rather than Rachel Adedeji, so I’m unsure if that is normally part of the characterisation. I suspect the attempts at an American accent that gradually slip away probably isn’t (most of the cast other than Clive Rowe Hermes stick with British and it works well in spite of the early 20th century American influence in the setting).

The parallels it out with the mix of settings is interesting. The harshness of winter in the the classical world with economic and environmental catastrophe of the Great Depression, the underworld as a corrupt company town, love and unity with solidarity and unionism, and even just the parallelling Hades and Persephone with Orpheus and Eurydice, but it also feels like all of that is struggling against the story of the original myth. It seems like for a while it is gearing towards a happy ending, but with Hades conflicted between not wanting to smother a rekindled love with Persephone and not wanting to lose face and appear weak, lets Orpheus and Eurydice back on the same condition of the original myth, with Orpheus failing in the same way. Despite it being utterly inevitable it still feels shockingly sudden within the play, which I suppose is appropriate: Death is like that.

But we tell the story anyway in the hope that it might somehow, impossibly, turn out another way.

Josie and the Pussycats ★★★★☆

2026-06-16T10:39:40+01:00

Interesting to compare this to Legally Blonde, a film from the same year that was much more successful, more fondly remembered, and which I found much more lacking on rewatch. Legally Blonde does have some very memorably and quotable bits, but I found Josie and the Pussycats had a lot more energy, a lot more laughs, and just a lot more fun. They are both of their time but Legally Blonde only puts me back into thinking “Oh yes, this is how Hollywood films and stereotypes were in the early 2000s,” Josie and the Pussycats puts one back into an over the top version of the music and consumer culture at the time, overlaid with absolutely obscene product placement.

It’s kind of a great encapsulation of capitalist recuperation. A genuinely fun film about the evils of consumerism and advertising, utterly plastered with completely genuine product placement that both sells and undermines its own message because Evian doesn’t care about how it’s being made fun of with the grotesque spectacle of the Evian-sponsored aquarium because you are still getting to see a giant Evian logo plastered over your screen for an entire scene. Buy a fucking Dreamcast.

Awaria ★★★★★

2026-06-15T13:47:53+01:00

The generator needs a battery¹ to fix it. I run past the capacitor machine, double tap it to grab a capacitor and set the machine going again to make another one. I weave past a green, ghostly flame and skim against the edge of a mine to trigger it while avoiding the blast, clearing it from the floor. A second generator has blown. I tap the coolant machine to grab a case of coolant just in case I need it for something else. I reach the battery machine, tap it to drop the capacitor in and start it generating a battery. I tap the second generator to see what it needs: A heat sink. That’s good, there’s one ready to go. I dodge past more ghost fire and swing past the heat sink machine, tap it to grab the heat sink and tap it again to drop the coolant I was carrying in to set another one going. The generator next to me blows so I check what it needs to fix it as I move on: Coolant and a heat sink. The battery is ready so I grab another capacitor, set the machine going again, go to the battery machine, and grab the battery. I mistime my second tap and don’t put the capacitor in place to make a new battery. I don’t turn around, there’s three ghosts after me and I can get do it on the next loop around. I drop the battery into the first generator to fix it. Another generator blows. Eight seconds have passed.

Awaria is built around a series of tight loops. Generators that need constant repair on a countdown till they explode, machines that make parts on a five second timer and machines that need those parts to make secondary components, ghosts that constantly harass you as you weave through it all and a ten second regeneration timer on your one hitpoint. Everything exists in the moment-to-moment flow of these loops and the constant, small decisions that you have to make to react to everything. The levels are short, the restarts are quick and the music is pushing you forward, making dying and restarting just another that all the others reside in. Being allowed to take one hit every ten seconds means that there is some leeway but doesn’t mess with the momentum of the game, letting you recover from a single mistake but not making health a resource you have to manage across a level, just something else built into the rhythm of the game. Hard mode takes away that leeway, making any hit a failure and really driving you to prefect that state of flow that you need to sink in to survive.

This and Helltaker, with a degree of cheesecake art as a central point, are the kinds of things I might have turned my nose up at before, but I’ve gotten a bit less repressed about and lightened up about sex a lot. I think a lot of things that lean into that are still very steeped in misogyny, but Vanripper puts a lot of style and personality into his art that I appreciate and I think one of the women having a rusted, metal jaw² that makes her look like she has thick stubble is a wonderful choice that I did not expect and looks sick as hell.

The different parts are not named in game. The ones I’m using here I’ve made up based on their appearance. ↩
A prosthetic jaw is how I interpreted her artwork but it’s not actually stated exactly what’s going on with her and other people online have interpreted it as burns or else that being her normal skin colour and the whiter part being painted on. ↩

Carrion: Greatest Time of Year ★★☆☆☆

2026-06-15T12:43:27+01:00

A fun little bonus level that lets you play around a bit more with the endgame abilities of the main game, but doesn’t add anything new.

Carrion ★★★☆☆

2026-06-15T12:41:51+01:00

The moment-to-moment feeling of being the thing feels wonderful on a twin-stick controller. The movement at once feels fluid, deft and heavy, especially as you amass flesh, and grabbing and flinging victims, obstacles and improvised weapons with your tentacles is great and allows for encounters that are both comedic and satisfying and it looks great.

But the larger structure of the game feels half-baked. It doesn’t, in the end, have that many tools in its toolbox, with puzzles and combat encounters remixing the same elements many times over. It seems like a Metroidvania at first but progression is almost entirely linear, with no meaningful navigation to be done. There are some optional upgrades to backtrack for, and which offer some of the game’s more detailed puzzles, but the rewards are all fairly uninteresting stat increases and I only ended up getting them because when the game world really opens up at the end I quickly got lost and didn’t know where to go to get to the actual endgame area, the linear path of the game not really having helped build up any sense of direction or understanding of the layout of the world.

Still, it’s quite fun and well-paced, with new abilities doled out at regular intervals over the couple of hours it takes to play to keep things interesting.

Stewart Lee vs. the Man-Wulf ★★★☆☆

2026-06-11T15:45:00+01:00

I have not seen a tonne of Stewart Lee’s standup outside of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle but I absolutely adored that, so I was looking forward to seeing him live. Unfortunately while it was still very funny I don’t think the central conceit lands very well. Lee circles the topic of right-wing comedians and how comedy that is cruel is easy, satisfying and apparently very well compensated, and how much impact such performance has on the world and the moral culpability comedians who engage with it have, but as he said himself in the act: He’s been doing this routine for eighteen months and those seem like very small questions compared to everything that’s been happening since then.

I don’t think the shift in the second half, to his over-the-top impression of a white-wing standup (after being bitten by werewolf and turning into a chud) landed very well, and neither did the final act where he tries to explore and show the silliness the idea of a left-wing version of the same shtick. This isn’t helped by the concept of “the Joe Rogan of the left” being a phrase that everyone is sick of at this point and I think the energy of the room was just not with him either. References to British popular culture made a lot of jokes sail over my head as well. I am unfortunately too checked out of what’s on television these days.

The Amazing Digital Circus ★★★☆☆

2026-06-11T15:40:38+01:00

Fun show and good character dynamics, though I am a bit cold on how it wrapped up. Using glitchy aesthetics in animation are not unusual in animation at this point but it all looks increasingly good as the show goes on I appreciate the clear love it shows in replicating the ways that games and digital spaces being uncanny, with the second episode in particular being a highlight with its out of bounds developer rooms and Source engine physics object clipping.

Helltaker ★★★☆☆

2026-06-11T15:34:03+01:00

Transparently just a vehicle for the cute demon girl art, but the demon girl art is cute. Short and sweet, ramps up quickly and explores what it wants to do and does it well. I am not very good at Sōkoban puzzles though, and with the strict turn limits I did have to look up how to do a few of the puzzles that I got stuck on. I did quite enjoy beating my head against the rhythmic boss levels until I was able to get through them, though.

The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act ★★☆☆☆

2026-06-11T15:16:44+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

Fairly cold on this as a finale. To get the minor quibbles out of the way first, going to a showing that starts with an appeal to not post spoilers and a promise that there will be a link to get merchandise at the end of the credits is a bizarre intrusion of kind of ugly online dynamics into the cinema that made me immediately feel a bit uncharitable which was not helped aided by the overly-long recap (though I suppose that was also for parents being dragged along by their kids who would have no idea what was happening otherwise).

Other than Jax everyone’s personal stories seem to get pushed aside after the big Caine torture sequence in the penultimate episode for everyone to become very generically emotionally healthy and cry about sticking together and putting aside any past conflicts, despite no one ever really having done anything seriously bad to each other, just rubbed up against each other poorly while they were all stuck in a horrible situation. Most of what was happening felt kind of perfunctory and obvious, but also stretched out too long and over-elaborated on.

Caine doing a complete turnabout almost immediately after his extremely sharp malicious turn in the episode immediately prior was also fairly unsatisfying and his Facebook slideshow is the only point everyone’s individual problems come back up again, only to kind give a weird, sappy, inspirational epilogue to… not really the characters we’ve actually been watching but some other versions of them that can live out their dreams in the world when they can’t and give them some cheap closure. Clearly learning everyone’s “real” names was meant to be significant but I could not care at all and the only character who this section really gives any more context on is, of course, Jax.

Jax’s part, for being the centre of the finale and considering actually happens, also feels surprisingly clean. It’s the best part of the finale, but also feels like it should have been spread out over more of the run and less neatly. From what we’d previously seen one should expect that abstraction would leave someone psyche in a much less coherent place, but everything is laid out perfectly in order for Pomni and us to see.

The Boys S5 ★★☆☆☆

2026-06-05T13:20:07+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

The Boys remains fun until the end but it was very apparent that ever since the third series the show has no idea for what to do other than have Homelander put everyone around him under more and more strain while the boys chase after a series of plot devices in the hopes of killing him until here, in the last two episodes, one of them finally works. Everything just kept lurching on in much the same way despite how increasingly little sense that made. The promise of massive escalation at the end of the fourth series was immediately rolled back but the boys are able to operate in pretty much the same way, going alone with Butcher every time despite everyone increasingly saying how fucked up and wrong he is, whether or not they are broke and slumming it up in one of Frenchie’s mob-connected safehouses, part of the CIA, or the most wanted fugitives in an increasingly fascist police state.

There are some changes! Kimiko is American now! And she talks in fluent English with an American accent. I do understand why getting her voice back would be a big thing and why they wouldn’t want the actress to put on a Japanese accent with broken English but it’s incredibly jarring, especially in Though the Heavens Fall where she gushes to an Asian-American woman about inspiration it was to see someone like her on TV when growing up despite the fact that Kimiko grew up in fucking Japan. She has only been in America for a few years. It’s not like the writers forgot that she’s not American; she says a few lines later that the show is how she first learned English. Did the writers think that Japan doesn’t have it’s own TV shows?

Kimiko also now speaks like a 2010s Redditor who has watched nothing but Kevin Smith movies trying to write Joss Whedon quips. It’s painful to watch and Karen Fukuhara gives a much less expressive performance now compared to when she was playing without her voice (though I can’t imagine it’s easy to give a strong performance while reading those lines). Everyone else’s dialogue is almost as dire now too. The show has been Flanderised into puerile vulgarity and clichéd inspirational speeches, completing its transformation from comic book satire into Marvel with knobs. We even get a slow motion sequence for A-Train that is pulled straight out of Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men films except that it looks like shit.

The satire, of course, has entirely shifted to political, but is all very surface level. It makes little jokes about and references to Trump’s regime and its media arms, and some of them did make me laugh, but it has very little to say outside of ~~orange~~ flag man bad. The series also fails to give much of a sense of what Homelander’s regime is like for people day to day outside of those at the top. People getting rounded up and arrested is mentioned a lot in passing and we see the camps but we get nothing like the subplot of seeing M.M.’s ex-wife’s boyfriend getting radicalised. There’s no place for that in the series any more when everyone has fully become comic book characters and are completely disconnected from normal life. Firecracker’s plot in One-Shots is the one part of the series that delivers something a bit better.

When the series finally, reluctantly, puts Hughie and Butcher in a moral conflict that was promised for so long it really doesn’t seem like it has anything to say. Butcher, after Homelander is dead and everything is over, threatening to still release the supervirus, says that he wants to kill the very idea of superheroes. I was expecting, in line other big speeches in the final few episodes, some refutation of the importance of superheroes and of stories. Some point being made about comics and superheroes in general, but the show doesn’t really have anything to say about that. Hughie is just forced to kill Butcher to stop him from committing mass murder and there isn’t really anything deeper. It’s fine. Don’t worry that none of the underlying structural problems with Vought and the superhero industry have been fixed at all.

Sage also ends up being an incredible waste. After so much contrivance being justified as part of her master plan her big plan is just… cause mass chaos so she can be Henry Bemis from Time Enough at Last in a bunker. Wow! A seventy year-old episode of the Twilight Zone! How original. But… why couldn’t she just do this anyway? She basically was already doing that before Homelander showed up. What, she can manipulate everyone in convoluted ways but couldn’t figure out a way to just get away from Homelander? To get rich on the stock market and build her bunker anyway? And then in the same episode where Kimiko forgets that she grew up in Japan, Sage is blindsided about Soldier Boy siding with Homelander despite the fact that back-Ashley told her in the same fucking episode that Soldier Boy was sympathetic to Homelander. Why are you surprised?

It’s not all bad. I still enjoy The Deep becoming ever-more pathetic and I quite enjoyed Ashley’s suffering in proportion to her increasingly higher rank as she fails upwards, having long gone past the point here she should have stepped away and saved herself. Her short redemption arc, undercut by her literally declaring in a press conference “I did nothing wrong,” only to be immediately impeached was a great ending for her and the show is still, for the most part, quite fun.

They probably should have stopped after they ran out of ideas, though.

Rocannon’s World ★★★☆☆

2026-06-05T13:17:27+01:00

They can send death at once, but life is slower.

I have previously read three books in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and City of Illusions. Having read through Earthsea a few years ago I’ve been meaning to revisit Le Guin’s science fiction series and decided to start at the beginning.

Interesting to see threads of both the later Hainish Cycle books and of Earthsea starting here, with its heroic high fantasy world and story embedded in a science fiction setting. Le Guin’s prose is always wonderful to read and I really enjoyed the contrast in perspectives between Semley in the prologue and Rocannon in the rest of the novel, though it’s difficult not to judge it against her later works and find it less cohesive.

Normal ★★☆☆☆

2026-06-01T22:34:47+01:00

American Hot Fuzz (derogatory).

We Made It, Kid ★★★☆☆

2026-05-31T19:11:05+01:00

It was clear that in 1961, no unmarried woman was going to be allowed to walk the streets of Limerick with her illegitimate child, especially a child of colour.

I’m not much of a reader of biographies and I am honestly not that interested in the personal details of other people’s lives, but the parts I find more interesting is the brief personal lens on the social conditions of Ireland in the ’60s and ’70s and the way that the state and church, in their union, tore people’s lives apart. This woman was torn from her mother’s arms as a baby because her mother was unmarried and her skin was too dark and not a single person who was involved in it has ever faced a single consequence for it.

Legally Blonde ★★☆☆☆

2026-05-30T20:36:37+01:00

Honestly fairly disappointing on rewatch. I did not remember this being so slow paced and the jokes being so thin on the ground. Fun and Elle is delightful but only got a few real laughs out of me and there’s some stuff here that is definitely left back in the 2000s.

Hokum ★★★★☆

2026-05-24T20:05:12+01:00

Has the confidence to do both horror and comedy without the normal horror comedy mode of undermining the former for the latter and manages to be both very scary and very funny. There is something delightful about Ohm’s refusal to acknowledge that he is in a horror movie for so long and treat everyone around him as, rather than ominous or off-putting, just very annoying. A lot of really lovely cinematography and fun shot composition as well, though I do feel it pulls its punches with the ending.

Sonic Generations (2024) ★★★★☆

2026-05-24T13:25:39+01:00

Sonic Generations was the first real 3D Sonic game that I every actually played. It’s what got me back into the series as an adult. In the years since I have gone back and played or replayed every game represented across the levels featured in it, and it still stands as a triumphant monument to the series and a wonderful love letter to two decades of games. It’s honestly surprisingly how little they touched it for this rerelease, but mostly they didn’t need to; the game still looks fantastic.

I will admit that the cracks have started to show in the gameplay. While Sonic Generations stood as the definitive version of the boost gameplay for a long time, Shadow Generations showed that it’s possible, and desirable, to take off some of the guardrails, give the player a bit more control and a bit more expressive movement and have everything feel more fluid. The 3D levels in Sonic Generations are still a joy to replay, practise and learn to execute perfectly, but the amount the game tries to steer the player and keep them on that perfect path feels very clunky and disjointed. Similarly, in the years since Sonic Generations’ original release, Sonic Mania reminded us what 2D Sonic games are actually meant to feel like and Sonic Superstars, for its flaws, demonstrated that it is possible to bring that feeling in three dimensions, though I think the use of 2.5D level layouts and background layers in Sonic Generations is still unmatched in the series.

The changes from the original release that are there are mostly perfunctory. The control remapping to bring it a bit closer to Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations make going from one Generations game to the other a bit smoother, but they are very half-baked. You can use B to homing attack now, but it’s also still mapped to double pressing A as well and then the drop dash has also been mapped to double pressing and holding A, making it very easy to do by accident.

The drop dash itself is a strange addition. It feels odd and out of place in the 3D levels when the boost is already available and with the way the game swaps physics and acceleration on the fly in different areas make it feel horribly inconsistent and confusing to use. It should have a more natural place with baby Sonic, but is outclassed by the absurdly overpowered spin dash this game has, which has not been modified at all. The script changes and rerecorded dialogue are hardly a downgrade, but also make such a minor difference that it hardly seems worth the effort. I don’t really care that it was technically a continuity error that Tails didn’t recognise Green Hill Zone in the original script and the fact that the final boss, easily the low point of the whole game, is not changed at all is baffling. Even the awful achievement to beat it without getting hit is still in place.

The chao hunt added to each level is the one really substantial change and it was a nice, optional challenge that incentivises some more careful exploration, though less vague hints in some levels would have been nice. The game does have so many little detailed areas and environment details when you stop to look around, even though everything else in the game is telling you to blast forward at maximum speed.

But that chao hunt and the modernisation of the controls (and removal of a separate, buggy, launcher and configuration tool) is definitely not worth breaking a decade of progress the modding community has built around this game. The one real shame about this rerelease is Sega’s practise of delisting old versions of games, making the version with so many level packs, character swaps and countless other mods for it locked behind buying a large bundle of other Sonic games that most people are not going to be aware of.

The Return of the Living Dead ★★★★★

2026-05-24T09:06:29+01:00

This movie is just so incredibly fun. I love the punks, the soundtrack, the effects, the tar man. So many great and funny moments that I was excited to see my partner experience for the first time while watching it with me. So memorable that it managed to single-handedly ruin the idea of zombies in the public consciousness as guys in tattered suits rising from their graves and shouting for brains.

Otherside Picnic, Vol. 8: Accomplices No More ★★★★☆

2026-05-23T17:18:58+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

Sorawo-chan, are you engaging with first contact with Toriko properly?

Once again these characters spend so long avoiding talking about relationships that when they do it is shocking how open and frank they end up being, not just casually acknowledging the idea of lesbian relationships, but of asexuality and aromanticism and how many people’s wants and needs fit outside of societal norms. And this ends up mirroring the exploration of the Otherside in a way that I didn’t expect, though maybe should have been obvious. The alien consciousness on the other side of the Otherside is unknowable, but so are people. To grow to understand someone else requires you to both understand yourself and inevitably to by changed by them.

I also love Sorawo using 鵼 (Nue), a chimeric monster whose name can be written as a compound of the first character of both of their names, as a name of their relationship. Seems like the kind of dorky shit I would do.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos ★★★☆☆

2026-05-23T16:50:16+01:00

That it’s a pointless side story is a given, but it’s a fun one. The art is an interesting twist on the normal Fullmetal Alchemist designs and feels very Miyazaki-influenced and I really enjoy how rough and flexible the animation can be. Does feel quite overloaded, with that train sequence at the start having so much happening that it starts to become comical, as do the reveals and reversals later in the film.

Columbo S6 ★★★☆☆

2026-05-21T17:58:23+01:00

Only three episodes and none were major stand-outs. Not much to say.

Columbo S5 ★★★☆☆

2026-05-21T17:57:12+01:00

I think there is a loose trend here where they are trying to write Columbo as overly clever, with Columbo not just catching people out in a gap in logic but threatening to dole out ironic fates that returns a small aspect of meanness to the character not present since Prescription: Murder. The escalation of cases to involving international relations and spies also smells of insecurity in the basic structure of the show, though it still remains very enjoyable. The repeatedly leaning on Columbo shouting as comedy bit is not exactly the height of humour, but Peter Falk looks like he’s enjoying himself doing it.

Furuhata Ninzaburō: A Fair Murderer ★★★☆☆

2026-05-21T17:56:02+01:00

I am surprised that in this episode of all of them they don’t bring up Furuhata arresting SMAP. Perhaps they were feeling a bit insecure about this being the second time they’ve done the murderer being a celebrity who is playing themself. Fun episode and I enjoy Furuhata being starstruck and shy for once, though Ichiro is not a great actor. Like the previous episode Imaizumi is toned down to a non-grating level of Flanderisation. The conceit of a blatant challenge between Inchiro and Furuhata is cute and suitably dramatic for a big special so close to the end of the show as a whole, though I feel like Furuhata being happy to go along with such a game feels out of character compared to his previous views on the seriousness of murder and his tactics also seem more dirty than what they really agreed to, which then makes him seem inconsistent within the episode as well.

For Goodness Sake 2 ☆☆☆☆☆

2026-05-21T17:54:42+01:00

Any pretence that this was meant to be anything more that conservative propraganda has been utterly dropped. A polite, fifteen-minute tirade against affirmative action.

It undermines itself right off the bat. Dennis Prager says “My parents came to the United States from Poland.” Larry Elder, seated next to him, responds “I, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of Polish ancestry.” This is meant to be a slightly humour understatement of the obvious difference between the two that Prager is white and Elder is black, with the intent to highlight that this surface difference is fundamentally unimportant and tells you very little about each of the two men. But while it’s true that their skin colour itself is, or at least, should be, irrelevant, it still highlights a very stark difference in the social reality of African Americans: Dennis Prager can tell you where his ancestors came to the new world from, Larry Elder cannot. He comes from a population whose history and culture faced deliberate, systematic and largely irreversible erasure as part of the project of chattel slavery that was fundamental to the building of the United States.

But as with the previous short, such systematic forces cannot be acknowledged. Racism is presented as a ludicrous, cartoonish and old-fashioned idea and as a thing of the past, as shown by Trey Parker and Matt Stone doing a skit about hiring discrimination with faux black and white film effect, dismissing the idea that such things might still happen outside of dreaded liberal reverse-racism. Systematic problems don’t exist and if we have to admit that they do then they are a thing of the past and if you try to solve them you are the one causing the problem. And of course if you make hiring decisions based on diversity then your business will fail because people who are “diverse” are inherently inferior.

For Goodness Sake ★☆☆☆☆

2026-05-21T17:52:47+01:00

I can not give a good reason as to why I decided to watch an thirty-year-old, celebrity cameo-heavy short by a reactionary propagandist. Sometimes I make poor choices with my time. So why not overanalyse it like some sort of Youtube dickhead?

It starts with the sort of utterly bizarre logic and blatantly leading questions that Dennis Prager carried forward to his more recent videos: What has caused you more grief in your life—natural disasters or other people? What would you like to be most? His attempts frame the obvious and common answer of “people” to the former and the lack of people giving an unintuitive answer of “good” to the later as significant set the tone for a strange and incurious look into the concept of “goodness” through the means of mildly humorous at best comedy sketches occasionally interrupted by odd assertions such as “obviously we all get better as we get older.”

The short, unsurprisingly, has no real interrogation of what goodness really means. Most of what is shown boils down to basic politeness and charity. Any social or systematic aspects of behaviour beyond the direct interpersonal are delegitimised or never acknowledged as a possibility. A hollow, conservative view of morality. The idea of actually trying to fundamentally improve the world is sneered at as head in the clouds thinking that is necessarily disconnected from “real people”, and breaking the law portrayed as fundamentally bad. The idea of stealing from the rich is brought up, but only to be put in the mouth of a man stealing a sports car with transparently flimsy justification. People don’t resort to crime because of poverty and desperation, simply because they are being bad.

To Dennis Prager goodness fundamentally means fitting in with the social order with as little friction as possible.

Puppygirl ★★★★★

2026-05-10T09:01:03+01:00

I thought the interstitials as they were in this version were very appropriate and were among many things that convinced me of the foulness of the dog.

Just appreciating all the details on this the second time around. The over the top edits, the silly interstitials. I love the little clip of Lady and the Tramp when Milo offers Lou progesterone and then getting to see them again at the end.

The moments where they are completely up front with random people about what they’re doing always feel like they are about to go horribly but people are just chill. I love Geena the dog walker smoothly pivoting to professional critique about how the leash they have is simply too flimsy to hold Milo. Truly love and understanding can exist between the countless different types of weirdos in this world.

Dog Movie ★★★☆☆

2026-05-10T08:38:52+01:00

I think the situation will resolve itself, honestly.

The camera has such personality in this. Takes some cues from the mockumentary style without the rest of the trappings. One my favourite moments is early on when Haven realises that Bloo is fully naked and the camera starts to pan over to look and then immediately demures to focus back on Haven (who peeks).

Phobosplunker ★★★★☆

2026-05-10T08:28:51+01:00

You know how it is with spaghetti.

The Crazies ★★★★☆

2026-05-07T18:32:02+01:00

Well whatever they’re here for, it’s turning into a riot. Maybe they are just here for control. If they can turn a campus protest into a shooting war…

I don’t think I noticed how much this film is about the Vietnam War the first time I watched it. The depiction of the military, the imagery of the flamethrowers and the self-immolating priest, the inability to distinguish “civilian” and combatant and the callous disregard for life that makes everything worse. It is, in part, the Vietnam War visited upon home soil.